Links for 2022-07-03
We’re Training AI Twice as Fast This Year as Last: “According to the best measures we’ve got, a set of benchmarks called MLPerf, machine-learning systems can be trained nearly twice as quickly as they could last year. It’s a figure that outstrips Moore’s Law, but also one we’ve come to expect. Most of the gain is thanks to software and systems innovations, but this year also gave the first peek at what some new processors, notably from Graphcore and Intel subsidiary Habana Labs, can do.” https://spectrum.ieee.org/mlperf-rankings-2022
Trends in GPU price-performance: “Using a dataset of 470 models of graphics processing units (GPUs) released between 2006 and 2021, we find that the amount of floating-point operations/second per $ doubles every ~2.5 years.” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c6KFvQcZggQKZzxr9/trends-in-gpu-price-performance
“We’re launching the Inverse Scaling Prize: a contest with $250k in prizes for finding zero/few-shot text tasks where larger language models show increasingly undesirable behavior (“inverse scaling”).” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eqxqgFxymP8hXDTt5/announcing-the-inverse-scaling-prize-usd250k-prize-pool
Flu vaccines reduce your risk of getting a heart attack or stroke https://salonium.substack.com/p/2-big-studies-and-very-big-findings
The Degree of Fine-Tuning in our Universe — “…viable universes exist over a range of parameter space, which is delineated herein. Finally, for universes with significantly different parameters, new types of astrophysical processes can generate energy and support habitability.” https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03928
Superforecasting the monkeypox outbreak. https://www.swiftcentre.org/monkeypox-should-we-worry/
Lysophosphatidic acid secreted by the liver in response to lipid intake was found to modify brain activity in mice, with the potential to cause eating disorders. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-06-liver-brain-behavior.html
“When will the last human be born? How many people will there ever be? What does all of this have to do with you? In our latest video, we are looking at the temporal window of humanity to answer those questions:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEENEFaVUzU
People of all political persuasions agree that the world is becoming more and more morally depraved. https://psyarxiv.com/9swjb/
Landmark psychology experiment that indicated how easy it is to plant false memories in people's minds about getting lost in a shopping mall as a child passes the replication test with flying colors. https://psyarxiv.com/nh3zq/
Multimodal Brain Signal Complexity Predicts Human Intelligence https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.25.497602v1